Asset Capture

Asset capture is a strategy for developing a StranglerFigApplication. You can think of many applications as managing a key set of assets. A payroll system looks after employees, a trading system looks after trades, a leasing system looks after leases. To gradually cut over to a new system, you can begin by identifying a subset of assets that you'll start with the new system. Often the best assets to start with are either simple assets (because they are quick to get going) or those that have needs that are particularly difficult to handle with the old system.

To make this work smoothly you'll need a mechanism to migrate assets from the old application to the strangler and back again. Reverse migration sounds unnecessary, yet it's very effective both to reduce the risk and to handle cases where an asset may dynamically change in such a way that the new application can no longer handle it. So an initial payroll system may not be able to handle employees on sick leave, bi-directional migration allows you to move an employee over when they fall sick.

In order to manage the assets you'll need to use Event Interception to make sure you grab all the events you need for the captured assets. You don't need to intercept all the events, just those for the captured assets. You may also need to ensure the old system doesn't get events for assets it no longer manages, using something like a Content-Based Router

Most rewrites I've worked on have used some form of asset capture. My only regret with it is that we didn't use finer grained capturing to allow more frequent releases. Often the blocker was not having bi-directional migration. Once that's in place frequent releases are much easier.